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What Is The Inverted Pyramid?
The best way to structure articles, so says my editor.
I’m a local reporter in rural Vermont. I was recently covering a committee meeting about a changing education policy, and a committee member decried the lack of public knowledge about the issue.
The publisher of my paper, who was on the committee (small towns, man), said, “We have a reporter tonight.” He pointed to me, and I gave a meager little wave.
“No offense,” the woman said, “But we don’t all read every word of every article.”
“That’s why we use the inverted pyramid,” he said. He said it like she should know what he meant. She didn’t. Do you?
The inverted pyramid is a way to structure informative articles. For those who are writing informative articles online, it can be a useful tool.
The inverted pyramid is defined by Wikipedia, America’s best facts source, as “a metaphor used by journalists and other writers to illustrate how information should be prioritized and structured in a text (e.g., a news report).”
Basically, it means this:
- Put the most important information at the top of the article — who, what, when, why, how.
- Then share the important details.
- Then share other information — background info, general info.
The idea is that if the person only skims the top of the article, then at least they’re still walking away with the most important facts.
This is obviously most useful when you’re writing an article that is intended to communicate news or information. If you’re writing a personal essay where the goal is to take the reader on a journey to witness some change you experienced, then of course, you wouldn’t employ a structure that puts the most important stuff at the top.
The purpose of this upside-down-triangle approach is very simple: you need to tell the reader, quickly, why you’re asking them to read the words that follow. This is a best practice for most forms of informative writing, and it’s something that I’ve seen a lot of self-published article writers — both those who publish articles online and those who publish articles for distribution through marketing…
